Basically, I read all there was in nineteenth century newspaper accounts, plus the odd republished volume like Edward Curr’s Recollections of Squatting in Victoria. These gave me the subject matter for a book that never materialised, although most of the component parts were later published in journals, magazines and newspapers in the early 1980s.

‘The Legend of Wunda Woman’ was one of them:

A long time ago the Bungambrawatha clan lived on the banks of their creek.

The white creatures arrived in summer, when the creek was dry. The Bungambrawatha thought they were wunda – the ghosts of dead people with nowhere to settle.

The ghosts settled by the creek and tied to make contact, without much success. The Bungambrawatha had established ways of dealing with spirits, but not with ghosts they could see and touch, who ate and drank like real people. The amount the ghosts drank was alarming.

After the autumn rains, the ghosts wanted so much water they dammed up the creek and fenced it off. When the Bungambrawatha tried to go down they were driven away. It was a strange way for ghosts to behave.

The question arose whether the wunda were ghosts at all. Perhaps they were a kind of devil. Or perhaps they were real people who through misfortune had been inflicted with a deathly skin.

The Bungambrawatha watched the wunda more closely, to establish what kind of creature they were, but were frustrated by the wunda custom of wrapping themselves up, even in the heat of the sun. And at night, what was the purpose of fire if not to wrap round with warmth and protection?

Then the wunda spent a day screening off a section of their dam with branches and early the following morning one came down to bathe. When the creature removed its wrappings the Bungambrawatha could see it was not only white all over, but female. There could be no doubting the ghostliness now: all her parts were the colour of death. The creature was perfect, white like the witchetty – a wunda woman indeed.

Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”

Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things. No less a figure than Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, claimed that materialism --- at least with regard to the human mind --- is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” And on the basis of quantum mechanics, Sir Rudolf Peierls, another great 20th-century physicist, said, “the premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being ... including [his] knowledge, and [his] consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.”

How, one might ask, can quantum mechanics have anything to say about the human mind? Isn’t it about things that can be physically measured, such as particles and forces? It is; but while minds cannot be measured, it is ultimately minds that do the measuring. And that, as we shall see, is a fact that cannot be ignored in trying to make sense of quantum mechanics. If one claims that it is possible (in principle) to give a complete physical description of what goes on during a measurement --- including the mind of the person who is doing the measuring --- one is led into severe difficulties. This was pointed out in the 1930s by the great mathematician John von Neumann. Though I cannot go into technicalities in an essay such as this, I will try to sketch the argument.

Today the media—driven by blogs—is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online—and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning.

Everyone is in on the game, from bloggers to non-profits to marketers to the New York Times itself. The lure of gaming you for clicks is too appealing for anyone to resist. And when everyone is running the same racket, the the line between the real and the fake becomes indistinguishable. The Rise of the Manipulator At top of the pantheon of the media manipulators, of course, sits the late Andrew Brietbart. “Feeding the media is like training a dog,” he once said, “You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” And learned it did: they followed his lead exactly in the Shirley Sherrod story, and continue to fall for the manipulations of his student, James O’Keefe, who has ravaged NPR, ACORN, and many other liberal organizations.

Its epic battles are legendary. Its influence is undeniable. And it is hard to imagine that, in 1971, it took just a handful of individuals who were strongly opposed to nuclear testing to give birth to this worldwide organisation. So where did it all begin?

Corbin Dates was in the Aurora Colorado theater and describes a man sitting in front of him. Then the man gets a call on his cellphone and goes to the back exit door. He then props the door open and Corbin describes that this man seems to be motioning to someone outside.

Veterans won another court order requiring the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to hand over more documents about its Cold War-era drug experiments on thousands of Vietnam veterans.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in Oakland, Calif., said the documents requested were "squarely relevant" to the claim that the government failed to adequately notify veterans of the chemicals they were exposed to and what that exposure might do to their health.

The Army and the CIA, with the help of Nazi scientists, used at least 7,800 veterans as human guinea pigs for testing the effects of up to 400 types of drugs and chemicals, including mescaline, LSD, amphetamines, barbituates, mustard gas and nerve agents, the Vietnam Veterans of America and individual soldiers claim in a 2009 class action.

The government covered up the true nature of its experiments, which began in the 1950s under code names such as "Bluebird," "Artichoke" and "MKUltra."

In "Project Paperclip," the Army and CIA allegedly recruited Nazi scientists to help test various psychochemicals and develop a new truth serum using its own veterans as test subjects.

"Over half of these Nazi recruits had been members of the SS or Nazi Party," according to the class action. "The 'Paperclip' name was chosen because so many of the employment applications were clipped to immigration papers."

Veterans say the government was trying to develop and test substances that could trigger mind control, confusion, euphoria, altered personality, unconsciousness, physical paralysis, illogical thinking and mania, among other effects.

Imagine linking to a company's website when referencing them in an article and having that company demand you remove the link because of copyright concerns. Or worse, the company threatens to sue you because they say the link from your website resulted in "material financial loses [sic] to the company."

[ ... ]

Although, the pretense for the threat was a copyright claim, the company explained that the outgoing link from the blog hurt the company "due to search engine penalties resulting from the links originating under your control."

Google's most recent Panda update is said to punish "over-SEO'd" websites. In other words, websites with too many links originating from weak or spammy websites will be penalized by Google.

However, BigPinkCookie is the furthest thing from a spammy website. It's a personal blog with an impressive Google PageRank 5, which means Google has deemed its content quite valuable, and links from that type of blog are typically very desirable for search engine optimization purposes.

[ ... ]

This case displays the insane level that some companies will go to in claiming that unwanted links to their website represents intellectual property "problems". But, disturbingly, some authorities agree with this concept. Last year the Department of Homeland Security preemptively seized websites merely for linking to copyrighted material.

National Security Agency whistle blowers Thomas Drake, former senior official; Kirk Wiebe, former senior analyst; and William Binney, former technical director, talk to "Viewpoint" host Eliot Spitzer about their allegations that the NSA has conducted illegal domestic surveillance. All three men are providing evidence in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the NSA.

This 36-minute mobile movie is with novelist Tom Robbins. Robbins was named by Writer's Digest as one of the "Top 100 Writers of the 20th Century," and has been recognized with numerous awards, including his honor in 2001 as Willamette Writers' Distinguished Northwest Writer.

Cultural institutions by and large share one primary objective: herd control. Even when ostensibly benign, their propensity for manipulation, compartmentalization, standardization and suppression of potentially disruptive behavior or ideas, has served to freeze the evolution of consciousness practically in its tracks. In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.

When he’s not performing his official duties as part of a visiting delegation in India, Deputy attorney-general Muhammad Khurshid Khan chooses to clean shoes at places of worship as “penance for crimes committed by the Taliban”.

Khan, 62, is to clean the shoes of thousands of devotees at India’s Golden Temple in Amritsar in “penance” for the beheading of a Sikh by the Taliban in Peshawar two years ago, reported The Telegraph.

After spending several hours polishing the shoes of worshippers at Gurdwara Sisganj in New Delhi on Monday, where he was part of a Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association delegation, Khan left for Amritsar to clean thousands more.

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Roots

Revelation 13

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy...

...And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?...

Mark 13

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.